So you're cruising around the Internet and you see a link to an article from some trusted
news source and it's got a really intriguing title, so you read it. And later you find
out that that whole article was mostly false. What you thought was news was really just
gossip or conjecture. So we've got Ryan Holiday here. He's a media manipulator and he explains
how this happens.
So, so what I quickly discovered was that the media was this sort of hierarchy or chain.
At the bottom you have small blogs who have small readerships but correspondingly low
threshold for what they will and will not publish. Say this blog publishes a rumor then
Business Insider or The Huffington Post or Perez Hilton writes about. And now, because
of the stature of those sites, it becomes something that people are talking about on
Twitter, on Facebook, on email, they're chattering about it.
And what happens is producers for CNN, producers for a right wing talk radio, journalists for
The New York Times -- where do they find out the news? They're not out pounding the pavement
like it's 100 years ago. No, they're reading what people are chattering about online.
And that cycle is hijacked by people like me who say, "Okay, if this blog here has the
power to accidently start a media firestorm by what it publishes, I'm going to get them
to publish something that benefits me."
I, I've sent them fake anonymous emails and watched as that turned into front page stories.
The public isn't aware that this is how their news is being made, but on both sides of the
divide -- on the marketing side and on the news side -- neither is particularly concerned
with quality. They're concerned with what will get attention.
And that's because of how blog sites and news sites make money. First, they get a lot of
viewers to their pages. And then they sell that view count to advertisers. So to get
more views you do stuff like...
Asking rhetorical untrue questions in a headline; doing your fact checking after you've published
an article; gossiping; speculating; making up a story from whole cloth.
But what if I want good, accurate news. I mean, shouldn't news sites want to give that
to me?
Yeah, look, uh, I think the rule of thumb is if you're not paying for it they don't
give a shit about you. They're loyal to their advertisers.
If you aren't paying for it you aren't the customer, you are really the product.